Tag: Tagalog

Chedeng and Apple (Si Chedeng at si Apple, Rae Red & Fatrick Tabada, 2017)

May 18, 2018July 21, 2019by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

When you feel you’ve discharged all your social obligations, you might feel as if you’ve a right to live by your own desires. Whether the dreams you abandoned in youth will still be there waiting for you is, however, something of which you can be far less certain. Following the death of her husband, one Filipina grandma decides to find out, taking to the road with her best friend who is, incidentally, wanted for murder and carrying around the severed head of her late spouse in a Louis Vuitton handbag belonging to her vacuous step-daughter, in search of the one that got away.

Chedeng (Gloria Diaz), apparently plotting the death of her sickly husband, is shocked to find him already gone when she takes him his breakfast. Shielded by the window which places her in the crematorium and her children outside it, Chedeng decides to make a shock announcement that comes as no surprise to her supportive best friend Apple (Elizabeth Oropesa). Standing front and centre and with intense determination, she announces to her grown up sons that she is a lesbian and will now be embarking on a more authentic life. Her sons are scandalised. Despite the fact that her youngest son is gay himself (and slightly hurt that his apparently supportive mother had never thought to share her own conflicted sexuality with him), the other two cannot get their heads around it and assume their mother has had some kind of mental breakdown.

Meanwhile, Apple whose life has been far less conventionally successful has been married to a wealthy but violent and abusive husband for the last five years. Praying furiously for his demise through black magic, she eventually snaps and kills him. Calling Chedeng for help, the pair dismember (in full view of the “discreet” maid) and bury the body (save for the head which Apple insists on keeping, and his penis which she can’t resist nailing to the wall and ruining the perfect crime in the process). With both their husbands out of the picture the pair decide to go on the run to look for Chedeng’s first love – a woman called Lydia for whom she had promised to return, only that was over 40 years ago.

At heart Chedeng and Apple is a story of liberation. The two women have been consistently impeded by men who prevented them from living the lives they wanted to live, trapping them within the patriarchal system of the conventional family. Chedeng, a serious and earnest woman, has prided herself in conforming so completely to the social role expected of her. A straight laced schoolteacher, she married well and kept a fine home raising three sons and supporting her husband who apparently knew she was gay and just accepted it. With her children grown and her obligation to the man she married at an end, she finally feels herself free to be her true self. Apple meanwhile has had the opposite experience in a series of unfulfilling relationships with useless men on whom she blames (rightly or otherwise) her inability to pursue her dreams of becoming an actress. Finally ending up in an abusive but economically comfortable relationship, she eventually has no choice but to free herself through violent means.

A pervasive sense of melancholy haunts the film as it becomes clear how much Chedeng has suffered in sacrificing her authentic self to live the life society expected of her. Lydia, the lost love of her youth, was braver – she dreamt of escaping to an island for a simple fisherman’s life in which she and the woman she loved could perhaps live together wanting little more than each other’s company. Chedeng, conventional as she is, could not imagine it and, though she vowed to return and reclaim her love after going to the city, she has waited 40 years and fears it may be too late.

Yet the resolution to her problems isn’t found in romance but in the depth of the friendship she shares with the loose cannon that his Apple – a woman her total opposite who follows her desires to destruction and freely speaks her mind little caring what anyone else may think about it. The spiky banter between the two women has an authentic, lived-in quality that brings a degree of realism to the often absurd adventure and proves a comedic counterpoint to the heaviness of the issues. Warm and oddly hopeful for its aged protagonists, if lamenting that they had to wait so long to achieve their “freedom”, Chedeng and Apple is at once a fierce condemnation of an oppressive, misogynistic society and a joyful celebration of friendship and liberation.

Screened at the 20th Udine Far East Film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Respeto (Alberto Monteras II, 2017)

January 27, 2018June 22, 2018by Hayley Scanlon1 Comment

“Respect” is a thorny issue, is it something which is conferred from a position of inferiority, an acceptance of equality, or taken by force? Should the older generation be “entitled” to the respect of the young simply for having been born earlier, lived longer, and have less time left, and should the state also be “entitled” to the respect of its citizens even if it abuses that respect? Respeto is the debut feature from Alberto (Treb) Monteras II but like much Philippine cinema it comes with heavy baggage as its scrappy youngster attempts to come of age in the hip hop dens of the Pandacan slums where all around him the increasingly oppressive Duterte regime brings back terrible memories for a generation only once removed from his own which paid a heavy price to rid themselves of a tyranny they now see returning.

Hendrix (Abra), a scrappy teen living with his older sister and her boyfriend who prides himself for his magnanimity in supporting his lover’s annoying kid brother, says he has the “mind of a gangster” and longs to prove himself in the underground rap battling world which represents a kind of escape from the harshness of his everyday existence. Hip hop maybe the music of the oppressed, but there’s little politicking in arcane world of petty gangsters and drugged up thugs. This is a world of humiliation – the rappers rap about rapping, about how their rhymes are sweeter than their opponent’s, how their opponent is weak and they are strong. Despite an often careful honing of a craft, this rap is vacuous – a misuse of words that could serve real purpose to do little more than replace the act of physical violence with macho male posturing.

This is certainly a very male, macho world. Inducted into the rap battle scene, Hendrix is tricked into battling an old veteran, Jambalaya – a larger lady with an intimidating presence, but all he can come up with is a steady stream of misogynistic fat jokes, badly delivered, before he wets himself live on stage. Jambalaya quite rightly destroys him with an elegantly delivered takedown which subtly suggests everything he’s just said is completely beneath him and is therefore doubly insulting. Hendrix is humiliated, as the loser of the battles is intended to be, but he’s slow to realise that the game itself is already a betrayal of its own power.

Having stolen the money to participate in the rap battle from Mondo (Brian Arda), his sister’s dodgy boyfriend, Hendrix hits on an extreme solution to pay him back – robbing the secondhand bookshop run by an old man, Doc (Dido De La Paz), seemingly suffering with the early stages of dementia. The plan fails because Hendrix and his buddies aren’t exactly master criminals, but as a result they find themselves tasked with having to repair the damage while Doc, mildly outraged by the youth of the day, begins to see enough potential in the obviously bright yet stubborn young man to want to try to save him.

What occurs between them is somewhere between a war of words and a war for words. Doc, now an old man, was an activist poet during the Marcos regime who lost a wife and child to its brutality. In the end, his words were not enough but unlike those of the rap battlers of Pandacan, they were both beautiful and filled with purpose. Doc’s verses were, in a sense, intended to humiliate a regime – in this they are not so different from Hendrix’s rhymes, but they failed to take the place of violence. A man of words faced with the possibility of revenge, Doc was not strong enough to resist but bought himself only more anguish in a single act of primal rage that soon forged another link in a chain stretching out in both directions across an eternity.

Peppered throughout, radio broadcasts make frequent reference to a debate surrounding the long delayed burial of former dictator Ferdinand Marcos who died in exile in 1989. The older generation fought an oppressive regime and thought they’d won only for their children to betray the revolution they gave birth to – literally in Doc’s case as his son became a corrupt policeman who abuses his power to humiliate those whose should “respect” he ought to earn through continued service. Rendered powerless by their oppressive environments, both Doc and Hendrix sought to reclaim their self respect by asserting their voice, but in the end their words find only empty air. Somehow awed by ancient technology, the kids find an old record of a Marcos era protest song in Doc’s bookshop and realise they already know the words. The singer, seemingly a young person, begs to be left out the political storm, not to be dragged into a war he sees as nothing to do with him, but an escape from this unending cycle of violence seems unlikely while words remain weightless.

Available to stream online via Festival Scope until 20th February 2018 as part of its International Film Festival Rotterdam tie-up.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Independencia (Raya Martin, 2009)

September 17, 2017by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

Though only 24 at the time of Independencia’s release, Raya Martin had already amassed a reputation as an ambitious iconoclast, a director of “slow cinema” who made a fast start on a wide-ranging series of films dealing with the complicated business of his nation’s history and identity. Like many Philippine arthouse directors, Martin’s work is necessarily bound up not just with history itself but with its mediation or more specifically how cinema reflects and refracts on these increasing complications.

Moving on from 2005’s A Short Film About the Indio Nacional, Independencia opens with a raucous street scene as a collection of local townspeople attempt to celebrate the longed for liberation from Spanish rule. The party is interrupted by gunshots. A middle-aged man looks off into the middle distance and exclaims that “they” are coming. The Philippines will not be free after all, it has merely swapped one master for another as the Spanish have sold it to the Americans, rendering their declaration of independence nothing if not premature.

A tough middle-aged woman (Tetchie Agbayani) is not prepared to wait around to be recolonised and orders her less forthright son (Sid Lucero) to accompany her into the jungle where they will live their lives away from the chaos of war with no masters but themselves. Mother and son discover a small hut apparently abandoned by Spanish colonists of ages past and adopt it as their own, growing their own crops (such as they can) and learning to live off the land as their ancestors had, a skill taken from them by the false promise of urban civility. Some time later the son discovers an injured woman (Alessandra de Rossi ) in the jungle, who seems to have been raped and beaten by American troops.

Gradually the mother, son, and putative daughter-in-law shed their colonial corruptions by exchanging their Spanish clothes for those of forest dwellers, the son’s hair now long, and the cross around his neck the only reminder of his former life while he tells his son (or, more precisely the son of the woman he found in the jungle he is raising as his own) altogether older tales of magic amulets and snake fighting ancestors, conjuring a new mythology from the ashes of the old.

Martin’s mythology is resolutely cinematic. Shooting in black and white academy ratio, he adopts the style and aesthetics of a early talking picture, aping the visual language associated with the new occupying forces (though perhaps retrospectively). After leaving the town, the mother and her son find themselves in is not a real jungle but an obvious stage set with a painted matte backdrop behind it. As the family (or families) make their lives in this artificial world the trees behind them begin to thin out, the threat of the outside world always encroaching on the “independence” they are seeking to build for themselves.

The film is split into two by the incongruous presence of a propaganda reel, shot on messy handheld and depicting an American soldier shooting dead a peasant boy who pretended to steal an egg from a marketplace as a joke. The soldier poses over the child’s body like a big game hunter while the vendor looks on appalled. The cheesy voice over reminds us that this should be “lesson to all those people who do questionable things justifying them as innocent jokes”. The troops, it assures us are “everywhere”, ensuring that the streets are safe in this “time of crisis”.

Meanwhile, the family can hear gunshots just as the revellers did in the beginning and they realise their days of independence are numbered. The boy, growing older, is curious about his world, having only the tales of his mother and father to go by, not understanding the danger that surrounds him. He is fascinated by a “golden figure” whose hair and body shine so brightly he can hardly see them, but the boy is also out of place here constantly lost in the jungle that ought to be his home. The son, now losing his sight, exclaims that strange things have entered the forest – wonderful and terrible things, but that the “one who is bathed in light” will protect them.

Yet the figure which presents itself at the climactic moment is not one of light but of darkness, opaque and faceless. Left alone, the boy is faced with encroaching invaders on one side and a rapidly shrinking forest on the other. His choice is one of no choice, but he does, in a sense at least, choose his independence in the only way that is left to him.

Available on R0 DVD from Second Run.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Batang West Side (Lav Diaz, 2001)

March 6, 2017by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

batang-west-side Lav Diaz’s auteurist break through, Batang West Side is among his more accessible efforts despite its daunting (if “concise” by later standards) five hour running time. Ostensibly moving away from the director’s beloved Philippines, this noir inflected tale apes a police procedural as New Jersey based Filipino cop Mijares (Joel Torre) investigates the murder of a young countryman but is forced to face his own darkness in the process. Diaspora, homeland and nationhood fight it out among those who’ve sought brighter futures overseas but for this collection of young Filipinos abroad all they’ve found is more of home, pursued by ghosts which can never be outrun. These young people muse on ways to save the Philippines even as they’ve seemingly abandoned it but for the central pair of lost souls at its centre, a young one and an old one, abandonment is the wound which can never be healed.

Lonely New Jersey police officier Mijares calls his ex-wife out of the blue after two years but has nothing in particular to say to her or the two children currently asleep in bed he no longer sees. His father abandoned the family when he was only seven years old leaving his mother bereft and searching, neglecting her child in her grief-like extremity. Mijares’s mother joined him in America, but has been in a vegetative state for the last few years meaning Mijares is more or less alone though surrounded by familiarity in an area dense with fellow Filipino exiles.

Called to a snow covered crime scene, Mijares discovers the body of a young Filipino boy he often saw around West Side Avenue and whose face, if not name, he knew. Hanzel Harana (Yul Servo) is just one of many young Filipinos trying to make a future away from home albeit one with a series of advantages and disadvantages which have brought him to this unhappy end. Hanzel rejoined the mother who abandoned him (also) at seven years old to provide a better life for the family by earning American wages. Now the wife of a wealthy old man to whom she is more carer than life partner, Hanzel’s mother Lolita reclaimed her oldest son in order to “save” him from the dangers of a Philippine adolescence. Nursing a broken heart, Hanzel came to the new world but brought his old habits with him. Despite a brief period of personal growth helped along by his grandfather’s sagacious council, Hanzel falls in with a bad crowd promising a glorious new Philippine future through the wonder drug, Shabu.

Mothers and motherland mingle in the imagination as Mijares is haunted by strange dreams of his broken hearted mother, desperately chasing the elusive ghost of her lost love at the expense of that of her very present son. His mother’s condition requires him to undergo frequent sessions with a strange psychologist who is primarily interested in his dream state believing that dreams are a kind of inner scream which need to be exorcised and laid to rest. Mijares dreams of his mother but also of his teeth falling out which, apparently, is code for the death of someone close but the only corpse so far is that of the young boy, Hanzel Harana, whom Mijares did not know yet felt some kind of invisible kinship with.

The two men mirror each other, one young and ruined by hope and the other older and defeated by its continuing failures. Delving deeper into Hanzel’s story Mijares finds much to echo his own as Hanzel remains preoccupied with the idea of family and restoring his long absent mother to his Philippine home. Having been brought to the States away from a life of dissipation, Hanzel struggles as a lone figure in an alien landscape, unexpectedly bonding with his paraplegic step-father but locking horns with his mother’s live in lover and fellow Filipino exile Bartolo (Arthur Acuña) – jealous, violent, and manipulative yet, perhaps, the embodiment of a certain kind of dangerous masculinity.

Hanzel is not a Bartolo and this kind of macho posturing is not in his more introspective nature. Despite professing that he doesn’t read books, Hanzel is eventually enlivened by his grandfather’s doctrine of continuing education even picking up a love for computers which could have led to a very successful career path in the rapidly developing tech world of the early 21st century but the honest way is hard and slow and Hanzel is in a hurry. Losing patience with his grandfather’s kindly ministrations and his mother’s steely rebuffing of his long held dream, Hanzel loses hope and allows himself to buy into the half-baked theories of the Avenue’s other Filipino kids with their Shabu based ideas of revolution and eventual descent into drug infused violence and confusion.

Hanzel’s grandfather has a few words of advice for the not quite young policeman. Like Hanzel the Philippines are directionless, all their heroes’ efforts have gone to waste. It’s up to the younger generation to heal it while there is still time. Yet it’s not only future of which Diaz is in search but truth found only through exposing lies. Mijares interviews the witnesses turning up differences and conflicting testimonies each time, leaving him with no concrete solution to the central mystery bar personal conviction. Mijares’ own convictions have been wavering, his “American” persona is a construct, like that of many exiles attempting to throw off past trauma with a new identity in a new land. Dreams do not lie even if they do not quite tell the truth and so Mijares’ increasingly violent visions in which Hanzel dies a thousand bloody deaths at his own hand eventually expose this long buried secret which lies at the core both of his own identity and that of his nation, still unwilling to meet his eye.

A man cannot outrun his central truths and carries his culture with him even as he claims to discard it. New identities only mask old wounds, eventually fracturing unable to bear the weight placed upon them by the expectation of place. Shooting this time in muted colour, capturing the low light neon glare of a New Jersey winter Diaz switches to black and white for his eerie dreamscape whilst presenting us with a final moment of truth and reconciliation offered via video. Bleak yet oddly hopeful, Batang West Side is a statement of intent from Diaz, a cinematic quest for essential truth, uncompromising in scope and unflinching in its gaze.

An Investigation on the Night That Won’t Forget (Pagsisiyasat Sa Gabing Ayaw Lumimot, Lav Diaz, 2012)

February 17, 2017by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

an-investigation-on-the-night-that-wont-forget If Elegy to the Visitor from the Revolution was a poetic attempt to tackle the outpouring of grief which followed the murders of film critics Alexis Tioseco and Nika Bohinc, An Investigation On the Night That Won’t Forget (Pagsisiyasat Sa Gabing Ayaw Lumimot) is its mirror image – the somber and naturalistic testimony of one who was left behind, searching for resolution but finding only more questions and ongoing suffering as circumstances conspire to prolong the agony. As usual, Diaz uses the events to comment more widely on the often melancholy history of his country but also on the nature of narrative, time and memory in their necessity for the attempt to create order from a series of otherwise incomprehensible events.

Preceded by a title card reading Part 1: The Cradle of Memory, the central 55 minutes of the film consists of one unbroken static camera shot of a man talking to camera, recounting an incident which he is unable to forget yet cannot remember clearly. The man is Erwin Romulo, editor and best friend of Alexis Tioseco, occupying a chair next to a desk in his own office surrounded by books and papers, records and ephemera of everyday life. Romulo begins to tell the story that night and of its continuing wake alternating between English and Tagalog, gesticulating and fidgeting as his story becomes painful to tell.

At one point Romulo says that he’s glad they’re recording this because it’s already becoming so difficult to remember. Though he speaks uninterrupted for almost an hour (save for a brief moment in which he leaves the chair in search of water), Romulo occasionally goes off on tangents or pauses to explain something else, allowing the events to unfold as he remembers them. The camera becomes a cradle for his memory, a safe place of deposit where his own recollections can rest without fear of change for all eternity. Perfect and incorruptible, cinema stands witness to a time and a place to which it affords a kind of immortality in ever extending moments.

Romulo’s testimony concludes with a lament for the continuing absence of his friend, for the unlived future so cruelly severed by a violent, selfish act. This leads us into the second segment, preceded by a title card reading Part 2: Cradle of the Night. Beginning with a series of ordinary street scenes, the soundscape is soon broken by the reading of a long poem entitled Lullaby of Memory. Culminating with the line “Recollection is the final destination of justice,” the poem emphasises the essential melancholy which colours each of Diaz’s films in its sorrowful fatalism. The images are eventually accompanied by a great river of light as some kind of procession takes place, candles lighting the way as large numbers of people snake onward through the narrow streets. If the lights imply hope the poem seems to reject them as the procession represents a “failure of life” and the poet remarks that she “did not know how this life would fail me”. The lights go out, only to return, their meaning seeming lost and hollow.

Shooting again in low grade black and white, Diaz erases himself from the frame in refusing interaction or reaction to his subject even if there is clearly another human presence to whom Romulo is communicating his tale other than the cold eyes of the camera. Memory is a painful thing but necessary. The camera cannot ease the burden, but it can add to the experience, solidify a narrative which both buries and exposes its essential truths. The night is unending and unforgiving, the investigation may never be concluded. Those who take part in the procession carry a light in front of them but it seems to offer little illumination, the path is endless and leads only to suffering and loneliness.

Manila in the Claws of Light (Maynila, sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag, Lino Brocka, 1975)

January 29, 2017March 10, 2018by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

About half way through Lino Brocka’s masterpiece of Philippine cinema Manila in the Claws of Light (Maynila, sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag), the hero, Julio (Bembol Roco), sits watching the window where he thinks the woman he loves may be being held prisoner as a trio of guitar players strums out The Impossible Dream, unwittingly narrating his entire story. Julio is no Don Quixote but he has his own Dulcinea and, as the song says, without question or pause he is ready to march into hell for the heavenly cause of rescuing her from clutches of this cruel city. Not quite content to love pure and chaste from afar, Julio plays Orpheus descending into the underworld, plunged into a strange odyssey through a harsh and indifferent world driven by mutual exploitation and the expectation of violence.

Orphaned fisherman Julio has been in Manila for some months in search of his girlfriend, Ligaya (Hilda Koronel), lured away from her hometown by the false promises of the elegant Mrs. Cruz (Juling Bagabaldo) who claimed there were good factory jobs waiting for pretty girls in the city which also provide the opportunity to study. After she abruptly stopped writing home, Julio left to find her but months of searching have left him with few leads other than tracking Mrs. Cruz to a Chinese grocers where he sometimes thinks he sees a familiar silhouette in an upper window.

The first of Julio’s falls brings him into the world of the casual day labourer, reliant on the transience of ongoing construction and at the mercy of corrupt foremen. Having been mugged and deprived of all of his savings, Julio is completely broke and lucky to have found this job for which he will be paid 2.50 pesos per day, which is 0.5 pesos less than the wage he was getting on his last job. Later he finds out that his payslip says 4 pesos, but whether that extra 1.50 is imaginary or finding its way into the pockets of the foreman is anyone’s guess. In any case, the money is rarely paid in full but offered under the system of “taiwan” in which the company effectively refuses to pay the current wages but offers an advance on future ones for a small fee. Should an employee complain, he will simply be fired. Conditions are poor with no safety provisions and fatal accidents are not uncommon. When the project nears completion, workers will be unceremoniously laid off with no warning or additional pay, overtime is available but is paid at the basic rate.

Julio is a single man and is only ever thinking of his quest and so he is prepared to suffer. The labourers he meets are all good men and friendly, quick to help him find his feet in this often harsh terrain. Sleeping in the communal dorm, Julio makes friends with some of the other workers who each have their own dreams from studying at night school for a corporate job to becoming a famous singer but his closest ally becomes a kind man trying to support his paralysed father – shot in the back by police after refusing to leave the family’s ancestral farm illegally grabbed by a Spanish millionaire, and his younger sister all now living in a fetid slum.

Julio’s second fall occurs after he loses his job at the construction site and finds himself roaming around the city, ending up in a dodgy part of town apparently very popular for cruising. Picked up by a friendly local, Julio gets himself another place to stay but soon finds out the main idea is to recruit him as a rent boy for an exclusive gay club. Talked into it and persuaded by the possibility of earning ten times what he’d get in construction, Julio tries prostitution on for size but is not interested in sex with other men and finds it impossible to adapt to the kind of showmanship the role requires. His experiences do, at least, provide a kind of mirror for what he fears has befallen his lady love though the gay club is a much more open environment in which the staff is free to leave at any time, turn clients down, and generally take in the atmosphere whilst waiting around.

The city is a willing collaborator in Julio’s fate. Naivety has no place here where the only route out of oppression is to become an oppressor. Early on Julio mentions going to the police to get help for Ligaya but is cautioned against it. Impotent and hopeless, Julio’s rage only grows as he watches friends die in cruel, ridiculous and unnecessary ways to the point at which he almost kills a purse snatcher in a kind of vengeance against an unkind society. Brocka breaks the contemporary action with frequent flashbacks as Julio remembers happier times with Ligaya some lasting mere seconds and others minutes reflecting Julio’s growing madness and unresolved rage. To try to live here is to dream the impossible dream, but for Julio there can only be one way out and it lies in violence, loss and defeat. Laying bare the futility of life under a dictatorial regime with all of its fear and emptiness, Manila in The Claws of Light is quietly angry, filled with a young man’s fire as he finds the world denied him, his dreams impossible, and his hope already in ashes.

Restoration trailer (no subtitles)

Elegy to the Visitor from the Revolution (Elehiya Sa Dumalaw Mula Sa Himagsikan, Lav Diaz, 2011)

January 18, 2017by Hayley Scanlon1 Comment

elegy-to-the-visitor-from-the-revolution Lav Diaz is many things but he’s not especially known for his brevity. Elegy to the Visitor From the Revolution (Elehiya Sa Dumalaw Mula Sa Himagsikan) is something of a departure in that regard as it runs a scant eighty minutes but is, nevertheless, imbued with the director’s constant themes of loss, melancholy and despair conveyed across a tripartite structure peopled by three very different yet interconnected sets of characters. To say “only” eighty minutes long, yet Elegy to the Visitor From the Revolution first began as a one minute short, intended to form a part of Nikalexis.MOV – an omnibus dedicated to the memory of film critics Alexis Tioseco and Nika Bohinc tragically killed during a home invasion. Diaz’ film, however, outgrew its origins to become a stand alone feature in its own right.

Split into three sections, with the final preceding the second, Elegy to the Visitor From the Revolution begins with a long sequence in which a prostitute tries and fails to attract trade while a gang of crooks go about their business in another part of town and a man sadly strums his guitar for an audience of one. The Visitor from the Revolution arrives dressed in the clothes of a hundred years before, wandering through marketplaces and wading into the water, observing what has become of the country she and her compatriots fought so hard to free from the colonial yoke. What she finds there breaks her heart – her people are just as lost and miserable as they were before all of her struggles.

After a while our stories intersect and we discover that our musician is a dream or recurrent vision within the mind of the prostitute. He plays for himself alone but the Visitor finds him, listens to his song and then silences his sound to provide her own. She sings the song of a broken heart, of a figure alone in a field holding a promise waiting to be fulfilled. She knows feelings have changed, that worries run deep and that hope has vanished but, she pleads, hold on to our dream, to your promise, and stay true to your vow. In the latter part of the song, Diaz gives us one of his rare super closeups as the Visitor’s face remains impassive and unmoving while the music plays around her. As the prostitute recounts whilst describing her dream, the Visitor looks out at us with eyes full of sorrow, weighed down by all these centuries of despair. Nothing has changed, nothing will change and she does not know who to blame or what to do except to continue the fight even in the face of this seeming impossibility.

Shot in Diaz’ familiar black and white with low grade cameras, Elegy to the Visitor From the Revolution is a weary ballad from one heartbroken revolutionary to another. All here are victims of their circumstances, trapped within an atmosphere of corruption and despair which provides them with no hope of escape. The prostitute cannot ply her trade, the criminals do not get the money from their botched bank job, and the musician plays alone – his song unheard, his pain unshared. The past is ever present, hanging heavily yet invisible over each of them yet the future is equally oblique and untouchable. When you have no more hope, all there is left to do is sing. The struggle goes on, despite all of the setbacks and despair the desire for real change is hard to kill. A lament for the unresolved past, Elegy to the Visitor From the Revolution is also a call to arms or a hymn of praise to those who continue to sing their songs to an empty room maintaining the faith that the audience will someday appear.

Melancholia (Lav Diaz, 2008)

January 10, 2017by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

melancholia “Why is there so much madness and too much sorrow in the world? Is happiness just a concept? Is living just a process to measure man’s pain?” asks a key character towards the end of this eight hour film, but he might as well be speaking for the film itself as its director, Lav Diaz, delivers another long form state of the nation address. This is a ruined land peopled by ghosts, unable to come to terms with their grief and robbing themselves of their identities in an effort to circumvent their pain. Raw yet lyrical, Diaz’s lament seems wider than just for his damaged homeland as each of its sorrowful, disillusioned warriors attempts to reacquaint themselves with world devoid of hope.

Loosely divided into three segments, the film begins in the present as the three protagonists encounter each other in the picturesque northern town of Sagada. A prostitute, a nun, and a pimp each is later revealed to be living under a temporary assumed identity in an experimental “immersion” programme designed to help them deal with their traumatic past as former revolutionary fighters, each of whom has also lost a spouse to the struggle.

A short while later, the “pimp” Julian (Perry Dizon) and the “prostitute” Alberta (Angeli Bayani) have returned to their “real” lives as bourgeois Manila intellectuals – he a publisher and she a teacher. Julian is haunted by memories of his late wife, Patricia, whose sad song of longing echoes in the forests, while Alberta is preoccupied with her adoptive daughter, Hannah (Yanyan Taa), who has run away and embarked on a life of prostitution. Rina (Malaya), Sagada’s nun, remains a ghostly, peripheral presence – another truth neither is willing to acknowledge.

After giving us these two attempts to live with it, Diaz takes us back to the past as Alberta’s lost husband, Renato (Roeder), along with two other fighters hides in the jungle from government forces intent on routing them out. Trapped with no possibility of salvation the three men begin to go mad while Renato later breaks away and records his inner struggle in a diary which no one will ever read.

The weight of the past with all of its myriad traumas becomes too heavy to bear, fracturing the internal consistency of each of our three protagonists, crushing their sense of individual identity in a bid to destroy an entire culture. Unable to face their unresolved grief, each has absented themselves from themselves in an attempt to address their pain and confusion. This bizarre kind of therapy designed by Julian is intended to remove their sadness altogether by forcing them to live as other people but their sojourn in Sagada proves “too immersive” according to Alberta in a later sequence. Rina, the nun, is too greatly exposed by her new role, seeing everything through the eyes of innocence only further compounding her sense of loss and disillusionment with the cruelty of the world.

Alberta tries to face her trauma through endless searching for her husband’s body and through caring for the orphaned daughter of other victims of the military regime but her efforts are often frustrated by a lack of support from those around her. Julian, having tried and failed to cast off his painful identity, has emerged hollow and defined by an absence of self. Having penned a book neatly echoing the unheard lamentations of Renato in which sadness becomes the defining quality of the world, giving birth to art and music, poetry and cinema, Julian is now the god of melancholy, worshipped by tortured artists everywhere but trapped within a personal purgatory from which escape seems impossible.

Shot once again in Diaz’s trademark black and white with low grade digital cameras, Melancholia is indeed imbued with sadness and a crushing weight of the unresolved past. Alberta, left alone, continues searching in vain just as the beautifully lonely lyrics of Patricia’s song lament, trapped by hope but unable to find a resolution for all that she has so far lost. Raw and angry, there’s a kind of defeated resignation which fills Melancholia, an absence of hope that sees that nothing will change – this world is hell and the sadness cannot be cured. Julian gives in to madness and the allure of illusion but finds little comfort in it, moving away from Alberta who alone is still prepared to go on searching, yet hers seems like the unluckier fate, perpetually trapped in this hellish purgatory awaiting the friendly hands to pull her out seemingly never to arrive.

A scene which makes much more sense when you’ve seen the whole film (English subtitles)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6108TCsiOUU&t=3s

Heremias (Book One: The Legend of the Lizard Princess) (Unang aklat: Ang alamat ng prinsesang bayawak, Lav Diaz, 2006)

December 21, 2016by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

Lav Diaz has never been accused of directness, but even so his 8.5hr epic, Heremias (Book 1: The Legend of the Lizard Princess) (Unang aklat: Ang alamat ng prinsesang bayawak) is a curiously symbolic piece, casting its titular hero in the role of the prophet Jeremiah, adrift in an odyssey of faith. With long sections playing out in near real time, extreme long distance shots often static in nature, and black and white photography captured on low res digital video which makes it almost impossible to detect emotional subtlety in the performances of its cast, Heremias is a challenging prospect yet an oddly hypnotic, ultimately moving one.

Diaz begins with a long, static take of a roadway in which a convoy of pedlars is parked while the modern world passes them by in the form of speeding motor cars. Heremias (Ronnie Lazaro) is a member of this timeless nomadic community, travelling along the road selling handicrafts from a cart pulled by a cow. The other pedlars seem worried about Heremias, they describe him as seeming “unwell” and are concerned because he hasn’t been eating. Eventually Heremias makes the fateful decision to go his own way, leaving the safety of the caravan behind to tread his own path. Yet what he finds out on his own amounts to trouble and strife beginning with the theft of his cart and ending with his overhearing a gang of teenage boys outline their plan to rape and murder a local girl.

Diaz spends the first few hours of the film immersing us in the world of the caravan with its routines of singing and eating broken with children’s lullabies and games of basketball. Heremias, however, wants something more than his simple life of community and the security of the familiar. Rather than simply retread familiar routes alone, Heremias follows a solitary, untravelled path which promises little more than aloneness. His cow, in a fine supporting performance, is often less certain of the wisdom of his master’s decision and makes his displeasure known, though Heremias is unwavering. When the cow is suddenly removed from the picture, its absence is very much felt as Heremias is left entirely alone without hope or guidance.

On trying to report the crime to the authorities, Heremias finds that all of his faith in the rule of law has been misplaced. Though the police begin to investigate, it’s clear that they have little interest in solving the crime, eventually asking for a sizeable bribe to complete the job. Later, when Heremias hears the terrible plan of the drunken young men, he tries the police again but finds them unwilling to help as the young men in question are sons of important people. Finally Heremias turns to the church but the priest is unwilling to offer anything more than prayer to save the life of a vulnerable young girl. Heremias, disappointed and with his faith shaken to the core, is left with no other recourse than to strike a bargain with God. Fasting and wandering, Heremias hopes that God will save the girl whom he seems incapable of helping in any other way though Diaz offers no clue if his faith will be repaid.

The film’s title comes from the name of a town which Heremias passes through. A couple once lived there and had a beautiful daughter who was abducted and never seen again, save perhaps for a baby lizard appearing at her parents’ home. This story repeats itself in that of Helena – the young woman who will be raped and murdered according to the tale Heremias overhears whilst watching the young men waste their time on drugs and alcohol inside an abandoned home. Old stories seem to resurface in new but no less tragic ways as the lizard who can tell good men from bad gives way to a discussion of the Japanese who hid in the forests after the war, too ashamed (as the villagers describe it) to return home. Among the executed soldiers was a colonel, Oshima, but the men can’t decide if the Oshima who died was the bad Oshima or another one altogether or if the bad Oshima was really bad at all – he did, so they say, design the water sanitation system at the school to the great benefit of everyone.

Heremias wanders alone through the difficult terrain, falling ever deeper into despair. Though generally impassive, Heremias is allowed two great moments of emotion – the first as he’s overtaken by the enormity of the loss of his cart and cow, and then after his greatest test which leads him to make his fateful bargain with God. The police have failed him, the priest ignored him, and there’s nothing to say he’ll have any more luck with the invisible protector yet with this last descent into the depths of hopelessness he emerges changed, almost saintly, as he agrees to make a personal sacrifice for only the hope that the girl will be saved from her grizzly fate. Aimlessness gives way to purpose, as Heremias adopts the path of the fallen prophet.

Though the low res cinematography and extreme distance shots add to the film’s alienating approach, there are moments of rare beauty as Diaz captures the natural landscape even as it proves hazardous or threatening to man. Unusual sound design completes the effect as the boys’ loud rock music suddenly cuts out while they detail their heinous plans, or ancient folk songs float through the background, eerily echoing ongoing events. Oblique and detached, Diaz’s lengthy spiritual epic resolutely rejects connection yet the cumulative effect of its distancing approach leads to its ambiguous if ultimately moving conclusion.

Heremias loses his cow (dialogue free)

The Bacchus Lady (죽여주는 여자, E J-Yong, 2016)

October 6, 2016December 1, 2016by Hayley Scanlon3 Comments

bacchus-lady Rather than a Maenad in a divine frenzy driven by drunkenness, lust, and hedonistic fury, a “Bacchus Lady” is a humorous nickname used for the older women who solicit men in Korean parks by euphemistically offering to sell them a bottle of Bacchus energy drink. E J-yong reteams with veteran Korean actress Youn Yuh-jung to tell the tragic story of Youn So-young, hooker with a heart of gold and now a member of the older generation permitted to slip through the cracks in the absence of familial connections.

Youn So-young (Youn Yuh-jung) is going to have to close the shop for a few days, she has gonorrhoea thanks to a no good customer who (presumably) paid her extra for no protection. As if that weren’t bad news enough, So-young becomes a witness to a public domestic dispute as the doctor’s Filipina former lover and mother to his unacknowledged son tracks him down to his clinic. During the heated argument conducted in English the jilted lover stabs her no good former beau with a pair of scissors and is hauled off by security, instructing her young son, Min-ho, waiting downstairs, to make a run for it.

Not knowing quite why, So-young chases after the boy and ends up taking him home. With the help of her transgender landlady (An A-zu) and younger neighbour with a prosthetic leg (Yoon Kye-sang), So-young cares for the boy before trying to figure out what’s going on with his mother. So-young returns to work after her initial problems are cleared up which brings her into contact with three former clients who each have a very unusual favour to ask of her…

First and foremost, The Bacchus Lady (죽여주는 여자, Jug-yeo-ju-neun Yeo-ja) wants to ask a lot of questions about the status of the elderly in contemporary Korea. Korea has one of the highest rates of older people living in poverty among the developed nations with many forced to keep working to support themselves even as their health fails. Though many older people have extended family networks, the nature of modern society leaves them isolated as their children may have moved away or even to foreign countries and are not able, or simply not interested, in providing later life care for their relatives. Some, like So-young, are on their own. With no familial connections to rely on and only her neighbours to count as friends, she has few options and opportunities for women of her age are thin on the ground.

Speaking to a client who turned out to be a documentary filmmaker, So-young reveals that she chose prostitution out of pride – she couldn’t bring herself to take a street cleaning job and thinks this is better. In fact, her story is more complex and exposes a deep seem of historical social problems as So-young first became a prostitute at the American air base.

There are odd parallels to be found everywhere – So-young was seduced an abandoned by an American soldier just as Min-ho’s mother has been abandoned by her Korean doctor who returned home and married well, leaving her far behind. In fact, Min-ho has a picture of his happy family which is almost identical to one So-young has stashed away in a drawer (only she’s torn out the painful half of hers). Now the Koreans are making the same mistakes as the previously mentioned occupying forces, sowing their wild oats abroad and forgetting all about their foreign adventures when they come home to settle down.

Parents reject their children, and children reject their parents. When one of So-young’s former customers suffers a stroke, his son’s family come back from the States to visit him but the daughter-in-law coldly announces that they won’t visit again for another year (knowing full well he may not have that long). The grandchildren barely speak Korean and aren’t interested in hanging round the sickbed of a man they don’t quite know, grandfather or not. The son says nothing. The daughter-in-law even tries to stop So-young visiting her husband’s father assuming she’s some kind of granny gold digger (got to protect that inheritance after all). No wonder the poor man becomes the first of many asking So-young to help him to die. Loss of youth, loss of health, loss of relationships – the loneliness and the boredom alone are too much to bear, let alone pecuniary worries.

So-young is an impulsive sort of woman. When asked why she does some of the things she does, So-young replies that she doesn’t know, she must be mad. Yet there’s a kindness and a naivety belying her otherwise straightforward personality. Even if she can feel something is probably a bad idea but it might help, she feels compelled to do it anyway, eventually with disastrous consequences. So-young is a nice woman who’s been unlucky and society continues to make her pay for that. Always left feeling as if she needs to atone for an unforgivable sin, So-young lives an oddly ascetic life, taking few pleasures and giving away most of her rewards. Her story may be an extreme one, but hers is the fate of many older women who find themselves abandoned without pensions, savings, or family to help them survive.

An interesting look at life on the fringes of an affluent city, The Bacchus Lady is sad tale though one filled with compassion and good humour. E avoids outward melodrama or unwelcome sentimentality, approaching So-young’s ultimate destination with the necessary pathos. The gentle accordion based score lends the film a whimsical air which is only undercut by the abrupt tonal shift and suddenness of the coda finale, but E’s aim is a serious one. So-young is her own woman, but she also stands for a disadvantaged stratum of society who have been consistently denied the ability to fend for themselves and are suddenly expected to do so in their old age when they most need society’s help. Sympathy for Lady Bacchus? Society would do well to take note.

Reviewed at the 2016 BFI London Film Festival

Original trailer (English subtitles):